Know thyself.

Experience is largely an individual thing. “Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so.” To collectively group people and treat them this way or that because of there membership is perverse and has been the basis of much racism, genocide, and so on. Respect for the military has been ill-defined. Respect for an individual is easier to get a hold on, but who can breach the barrier to someone else’s mind or motivation. Is a hornet brave because he attacks me when I threaten its paper nest? 'Bravery' cannot be defined with respect to an act in itself; that is, two people may take the same action, where for one it was an act of courage, but for the other it was a cowardly act, or maybe, like the hornet, it was just an act of duty. We need to establish a persons authority or lack of authority( do they just float around with the wind). A person has a duty to obey authority( I take the term ‘authority’ in a general sense. I am not necessarily talking about the US government, any law enforcement agency, and so forth, but rather what has a person established as right and wrong, to put it simply). Once a persons ‘authority’ has been established, then it may be appropriate to attribute bravery to this person for a particular action. For example, if a person believes it right that a war should be fought, yet he’s scared as hell to go fight, but does go anyway, then this is bravery. Now suppose he honestly believes the war is wrong, but is scared what people will think if he does not ‘serve his country’, and so he goes to war---He is then a coward; He has not served his country, if that country has any characteristic of democracy--he has weakened it. A democracy will fail if the people cow to public pressure---observe carefully my US citizens, for there is not a man, women, or child, that should not serve there country at all times---Vico may have the last word.